Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and a system for testing control software of a controlled system, the control led system comprising one or more electronic control units, one or more actuators, and one or more sensors, each sensor being adapted to input a respective sensor signal to at least one of the one or more electronic control units and each actuator being adapted to act responsive to respective control signals input from at least one of the electronic control units, and each electronic control unit being configured to execute a respective executable control program based on control software code data to output one or more control signals to the one or more actuators on the basis of input sensor signals.
Background Art
In controlled systems/plants, such as e.g. automotive control systems or embedded systems, there are provided one or more electronic control units for controlling actuators of the controlled, system/plant in accordance with out putting control commands that are calculated by the respective electronic control unit (ECU) based on control logic given by control software code data and current sensor values which, in automotive systems may indicate behavior of the automobile and/or the driver's actions. For example, some actuators may be controlled by electronic signals or by hydraulic pressure based on the ECU software controls. However, due to the increasing responsibilities of the electronic control units and increasing complexity of the controlled systems including multiple electronic control units and even multiple electronic control units sharing control over shared actuators, the demands on functionality are continuously increasing.
For verification and testing of control software, it is important to efficiently and reliably test control software of electronic control units of the controlled system/plant during development that are free of system bugs, especially in view of safety requirements. For example, JP 2009-014406 A describes a software testing process based on a so-called Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) approach in which a plant simulator is attached to an electronic control unit for testing the software of the electronic control unit. However, such approach focuses only on the control software behavior of the electronic control until but does not focus on testing the plant behavior so that some system bugs may be missed in the testing process. Also, in HIL approaches, it is difficult to test systems having more than one electronic control unit and system bugs occurring due to collaboration of multiple electronic control units may be missed.
In view of the above, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and a system for testing control software of a controlled system that reliably and efficiently allows to find the system bugs in the controlled system, including system hugs that occur only in specific situations due to collaboration of multiple electronic control units and plant behavior.